Dec 12 Storytelling

"As a theater director and a child of postmodernism, during most of my career I avoided the charge of storytelling. I was more interested in subverting stories, turning them on their head, reversing them, twisting and turning them inside out rather than serving them up in a conventional way. The destructive impulse led my approach to stories. To me, stories could be renewed only through their deconstruction.

And yet, something new is brewing in my approach to making new work. The storytelling that comes naturally to me in daily life is entering into my thinking about theater. I know that telling stories in life is a powerful tool to communicate ideas and lessons drawn from experience, but until now I have avoided fully embracing the subject in my work as a director."

I'm doing a new version of the Populism talk tomorrow (Tuesday December 13) at Dancemakers at 6:30. While tipped a bit towards dance, there is something that relates to the storytelling question in there too.